Senior Linux Administration Santa Clara, CA; Onsite

Senior Linux Administration

Location:

Santa Clara, CA (Onsite)

AI and HPC Infrastructure

Position Description

The Candidate will provide senior Linux administration services across AI and HPC environments supporting GPU clusters, high-performance storage, and data center network-connected compute infrastructure. This role is intended for a hands-on operator who can stabilize production systems, resolve complex node-level failures, and improve fleet reliability at scale.

What This Candidate Will Be Doing

• Administer large-scale Linux environments supporting AI training, inference, and HPC workloads.
• Own deep troubleshooting of OS, kernel, boot, package, firmware, driver, file system, service, and resource-consumption issues across bare-metal server fleets.
• Diagnose failures across BIOS, BMC, PXE, DHCP, DNS, NFS, local disk, RAID, NVMe, systemd, and GPU driver stacks.
• Build and maintain golden images, provisioning pipelines, configuration baselines, and post-deployment validation procedures.
• Partner with network, platform, storage, and validation teams to isolate cross-domain failures affecting cluster readiness or job execution.
• Investigate performance anomalies involving CPU, memory, NUMA, I/O, interrupts, process scheduling, and kernel tuning.
• Automate repeatable administration and remediation tasks with Bash and Python.
• Produce clear runbooks, failure signatures, and escalation criteria for recurring operational issues.

What We Need To See

• 7+ years delivering Linux administration in data center, cloud, AI, or HPC environments.
• Deep expertise with RHEL, Ubuntu, Rocky, or similar enterprise Linux distributions.
• Strong troubleshooting skill across boot flow, system logs, networking stack, authentication, service lifecycle, and hardware-software interaction.
• Experience with GPU servers, out-of-band management, firmware coordination, and cluster node bring-up.
• Hands-on knowledge of Ansible, PXE/iPXE, Kickstart, cloud-init, image lifecycle management, and configuration enforcement.
• Strong shell scripting and Python-based automation capability.
• Working knowledge of storage and network dependencies affecting Linux host health.
• Ability to operate independently in ambiguous, high-severity production situations.

Preferred Experience

• Exposure to Slurm, Kubernetes, container runtimes, or AI cluster schedulers.
• Familiarity with DCGM, Mellanox networking, and telemetry-driven health analysis.
• Experience supporting validation labs or pre-production cluster certification.